I just wanna start DMing a game and I need to buy $150 in books to do so? The fuck.
Edit: Lots of people telling me to play other systems. Here’s what’s up:
- I want to play a 1-on-1 game with my wife
- I’ve never DMed before
- She’s never played a TTRPG, so this would be her introduction
- She’s been reading a lot of fae-related fantasy, which has me thinking she may want to play roleplay heavy with some fae storylines present
- Ideally the system wouldn’t be too crunchy or combat focused
Edit 2: I’ve spoken with her and she actually wants a more modern setting
Pathfinder has a lot of materials available online for free. It’s got enough in common with D&D to matter and the things you buy won’t be feeding the WOTC/Hasbro corpo octopus with its increasingly insidious pricing and monetization and subscription-seeking.
Pathfinder is also much crunchier than 5th eds restrictively simple system, which I prefer.
Admittedly, yes, I do like simple systems when I just want to have that in the background and focus on the characters and story.
If there was a simplified Pathfinder that’s be great, but either way, I despise WOTC and am not going back a second time, not after their latest bazinga skullduggery of subscription seeking and license throttling and treat printers being proposed to replace DMs and tell the main campaign module stories.
Disregard this I didn’t notice it was you. That said, have you tried any of those systems? I’d like to hear your thoughts.
Have you tried other systems? D&D is not a very good story telling system. I’m not sure what the state of the art is but systems like Powered By The Apocalypse had a reputation as good story and character focused systems a few years ago. Mouse Guard, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and Blades in the Dark are all supposed to be quite good for that.
I’ve tried many systems but my group often only plays other games for a few sessions before wanting to go back to D&D or D&D-like for the most part and that’s why I suggested Pathfinder if someone else is having a similar issue or has similar needs.
I can sometimes go an entire session without a single combat die roll, so I make storytelling happen even in a system that’s kind of hostile to it. I do what I have to do.
Hell yeah
I had a blast running Heavy Gear’s RPG mode, but Dream Pod 9 sort of abandoned it, switched to “Heroclix” hype then some esports bullshit kickstarter that went nowhere, and the setting’s basically dead.
That’s too bad, because Heavy Gear’s “Silhouette” system does really fast and exciting high-stakes kick-ass-or-die mecha combat. At the high end it feels like piloting mobile suits that either rock face, fall apart into a failure spiral, or sometimes just instantly explode.
Combat resolves really quickly if you get used to it, almost at the speed of a cinematic story.
: p I had some fun with hero-clix style stuff when I was, like, idk 12? Because it was much easier for me to get in to than WH40k or something. I think the version I played was MageKnight.
I’ll have to look up the old Heavy Gear stuff. I really enjoyed the first PC game. My computer could only barely run it, I had to turn on the wireframe mode in any actual fight!
There was a lot of potential for the Heavy Gear series as a RPG setting. Even the characters listed in the core books had a novel “chess piece” system to show how important they might be to future books (so GMs wouldn’t get them killed off or otherwise changed too much if they were too important for future canon plots) which made me expect a vast post-interpolar war story spanning the terran colonies on the scale of Legend of the Galactic Heroes, or at least Gundam.
That didn’t happen because Heavy Gear became “Clix’d” and sort of abandoned any attempt at a long-running ongoing story, so it was up to me to fill in the blanks for as long as my tabletop group wanted to play.